This invention relates generally to portable electronic books, and particularly to a system and method to efficiently generate and switch page display views on a portable electronic book.
Advances in computer and communication technology have provided consumers or users a convenient and economical way to access information in a variety of media. One particular area of information access includes electronic books. An electronic book is a virtual device that receives documents, publications, or reading materials downloaded from an information network. Users of an electronic book can read downloaded contents of documents, publications, or reading materials subscribed from a participating bookstore at his or her own convenience without the need to purchase printed version. When reading the documents, publications, or reading materials, users of an electronic book may wish to scale the pages of the reading materials up or down depending on the users"" preferences. Accordingly, it is highly desirable to include a view switching feature to allow users to increase or decrease size of page display images or visual representations of pages of the reading material.
The present invention provides a system and method to efficiently generate and switch page display views on a portable electronic book.
The method includes generating an electronic book (ebook) binary file including a plurality of book views, each of the plurality of book views including information needed to generate page display images representing content of a reading material in a font having a particular font point size. The method further includes parsing the ebook binary file and generating the page display images representing content of a reading material.
The above described and many other features of the present invention will become apparent as the invention becomes better understood by reference to the following detailed description when considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.